Monday, June 29, 2015

The lineage of the term Obamacare
pretty much tells you all you need to know about how history will view
President Barack Obama. That is to say, what his legacy will be.

In
a (relatively) short five years, Obamacare has morphed from having a
Republican-driven derogatory connotation to being an appropriate
honorific for the man who against formidable odds has finally brought meaningful reform to a
vastly dysfunctional sector of the economy. Or
more precisely, made a damned good start despite
an obdurate opposition party that continues to believe that providing
affordable health care to the poor and middle class violates Americans'
"freedom and liberty".

Legacies
are, of course, in the eyes of the beholder. While few people would
begrudge George Washington and Abraham Lincoln their legacies as great
presidents, the tenures of Richard Nixon and even Franklin Delano
Roosevelt are too recent. And George W. Bush's is still too raw.

Nixon's
legacy is mixed because beyond his constitutional criminality and
stealth war in Cambodia were some notable accomplishments, including
environment-friendly initiatives and laws, ending the draft and signing
Title IX, while FDR will long be skewered by conservatives as the father
of Social Security and big government and not for shepherding the U.S.
through the Great Depression and leading the charge in beating back fascism.

Beyond
Obamacare, formally known as the Affordable Care Act and now twice
upheld by the Supreme Court, the president's greatest legacies -- amidst
innumerable vicissitudes -- may be to show that big
government can work in an era when Washington is widely distrusted, if
not detested, as well as his willingness to engage in costly political
fights from the day he took office. Although not necessarily always the right
ones, mind you.

People who naïvely
believed Obama could settle the issue of race in America are bound to be
disappointed, his tour de force eulogy in Charleston notwithstanding.
But isn't it a hoot that his legacy and that of Supreme Court Chief John
G. Roberts Jr. are likely to be intertwined although they represent
opposite ends of the political spectrum.

What impact might George W. Bush have on Obama's legacy?

While
Dubya left a hell of a mess and Obama cleaned up much of it, including
dragging the nation out of recession and presiding over the most robust job growth in 15 years, as well as ending a war or two, historians are not likely to factor in those
things in assessing Obama's legacy. I tend to agree.

It
is bemusing that Obama's foes continue to paint him as unpatriotic when
his love of country has been so obvious and his commitment to public
service -- from Southside Chicago community organizer to the first
African-American president -- has been a constant in his life. Both
are guaranteed legacy builders as our more immediate memories fade with the
passage of time.

When Obama commented on the iffy chances of the ACA passing on the eve of the make-or-break 2010 Senate vote, he quoted Lincoln in saying "I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true." And when his signature achievement survived another near-death experience in the Supreme Court last week, he noted "That's when America soars, when we look out for one
another, when we take care of each other. That’s why we do
what we do. That’s the whole point of public service."

FEARING THE TRUMP BUMP

Donald Trump is the best thing to happen to the Democratic Party since . . . well, George W. Bush.

Although
the celebrity gadzillionaire has no chance of winning the Republican
presidential nomination, his loud mouth is been increasingly viewed by
GOP insiders is a serious obstacle to taking back the White House.

"Donald Trump is like watching a roadside accident," said
former Dubya press secretary Ari Fleischer. "Everybody pulls
over to see the mess. And Trump thinks that's entertainment. But running
for president is serious. And the risk for the party is he tarnishes
everybody."

Trump is in
eighth place among Republicans, according to the RealClearPolitics'
average of national polls. That puts him ahead of so-called serious
presidential wannabes like former Texas Governor Rick Perry and
Governors Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Chris Christie of New Jersey, as
well as former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. That also likely qualifies
him for the first two GOP debates, which means taking away face time from so-called more serious candidates like Jeb Bush . . . er, Jeb!

Fleischer, who backs Bush the Younger and is a
co-author of a Republican National Committee report on why the party
got clobbered in the 2012 presidential election, said Trump embodies all
of the party's problems with nonwhite voters.

Trump has no intention of letting up on the personal attacks on other candidates and has eschewed the advice of advisers who want him to dump the vitriol, executive jets and helicopters and present a, shall we say, more humble image to voters.

He reasons (pardon the term) that Bush, as Florida governor, helped his brother steal the 2000 election, his brother then nominated John Roberts
to head the Supreme Court, and even though Roberts was on the dissenting
side of the gay marriage decision, it's Jeb's fault anyhow.

Got that?

A LITTLE HELP, PLEASE

I have written that the Republicans seem to have a limitless capacity to bite themselves in the ass by staking out positions that come back to haunt them, whether in governance, in court decisions as we have recently seen, and at the ballot box in national elections. The modern-day GOP surely isn't the first political entity to have a
franchise of short-sightedness, but I cannot think of a comparable
situation in American political history. Can you?

I'd appreciate
your help and insight for a future post on the subject. You can leave a
comment or email me at kikokimba@gmail.com. Thank you in advance.

Politix Update
is an irregular compendium written by veteran journalist Shaun Mullen,
for whom the 2016 presidential campaign is his (gasp!) 12th since 1968.
Click here for an index of previous Politix Updates.

Saturday, June 27, 2015

EASTERN CAPE, South Africa -- One of my
favorite memories of the historical work I did in South Africa was when
a car full of black South Africans -- a community leader's four tough and well
armed bodyguards -- saw the new South African flag flying for the first time.

It was during the first democratic election in April, 1994,
which took place over four days. I was moving around the countryside with
provincial ANC leader Smuts Ngonyama, who had been to hell and back during the
struggle and transition years. He had survived and had cast his vote for the
first time. Smuts wanted to see what was happening in the outlying
towns . . . villages, really . . . so I was squished behind two armed bruisers in the
backseat of a VW Golf. A real life "shotgun" rider was in the front, and an
armed driver was wheeling along the country roads at an insanely fast speed. Smuts,
an ANC colleague, and two more bodyguards were in the car in front of us.

It had been a rough year. It had actually been a rough life,
but the previous two years of the transitional phase were particularly bruising
for ANC leaders like Smuts in this region called Ciskei.

Ciskei was a country that never existed to the rest of the
world. It was one of nine imaginary countries, called Tribal Homelands, established
by the apartheid government of South Africa, designed to deny black South
Africans citizenship to white South Africa. By drawing boundaries around the
traditional black (known as African) areas and by brute force shoving all
Africans into those areas, they created both white security and a ready source
of cheap labor by then
issuing passes to those homeland residents so they could hold jobs and live in
hostels in white South Africa. The homelands had their own governments,
presidents, and armies, supported by the South African government. The homeland
officials were considered to be collaborators.

When the handwriting was on the wall that the homelands
would be dissolved into a new and democratic South Africa, and those homeland
leaders would lose their jobs, some threw mighty tantrums in the form of brutal
assassinations of ANC leaders whom they held responsible for this change in the
weather.

The whole thing was bizarre.

For my first trip to South Africa in 1988 I had a visa for
South Africa. But, to be able to travel into the rural areas where the villages
were, I had to get a separate visa from the Transkei Homeland office in
Washington. On my last day in South Africa I passed through a border post into
Transkei- like any other border post. I would not be allowed into South Africa
again, and would have to fly out of Umtata, a small Transkei town, and be
treated as a transit visitor to make a connection in Johannesburg for London.

Transkei residents had Transkei passports but because
Transkei was not recognized as a real country by the rest of the world, those passports
were virtually worthless for international travel. Which victimized those Africans
twice over.

Once I was in Transkei, I discovered there were many back
roads that did not have border posts, that went in and out of the small pockets
of white South Africa that were within the greater Transkei borders. The
telltale sign was the quality of the roads and electrical service.

Ciskei was like Transkei with a major border post on the
main road, but not on the back roads. The border post had official customs
agents, and above it flew the South African and Ciskei flags.

During the years that Smuts Ngonyama was at the top of the
Ciskei president’s assassination list, he had to be very careful of where those
invisible borders were. In 1992, simply by crossing an invisible line, we knew
he had just sprouted a huge bulls eye on his back. Then it went from being bizarre
to downright scary. The Ciskei troops were adept at assassination. We had
already visited a village home in which residents had been killed by grenades.
We also attended the funeral of a colleague, also killed by grenade on his
front porch.

A few days before the 1994 election, I attended a ceremony in front of the Ciskei Parliament
building in Bisho, the capital of Ciskei, with Smuts. It was just a short
distance from the Bisho stadium where, in 1992, Ciskei troops mowed down protestors
who were carrying a letter to the Ciskei president, begging him to stop the
violence against the ANC. Thirty-nine protestors died. Smuts was a survivor.

The ceremony was the lowering of the Ciskei flag and the
raising of the new South African flag. After an hour of blather about the
worthiness of the Ciskei leaders until a preacher stood up and spoke the truth
about the corrupt system and then there was a deathly silence. Everyone knew it
was the truth. Then the Ciskei Troops -- the ones who had carried out the
assassinations and terror over the years -- did a final march around the square.
The people in the stands cheered them! I was dumbfounded. Smuts said, "The
people are showing their forgiveness of those men." That was one of my first
lessons in TIA -- This is Africa.

The pre-election violence continued to be hectic until the
first day of the election. Then, a peaceful hush settled over the entire
country as the residents of all races, of all regions- now citizens- cast their
votes. It was a miracle.

But it didn’t feel like it, two days later, as I was suffering
in the back seat of that VW Golf with those scary guys with their scary guns
praying the scary driver will not go too fast around a curve and kill us all.
Or, that some suspicious character will come too close to the cars and a frantic
shooting spree would start. Still, I make a mental note that some day I would
return to this area to photograph the beautiful countryside around me.

When darkness had fallen and there was nothing to see - the
rural homes did not have electricity then - I saw the Ciskei Border Post ahead. There had
been some discussion among Smuts and the bodyguards as to whether they should
take the route that passed the border post. Would they have trouble crossing
it? It had always been something to avoid. But, the post was deserted. And,
above it, in the glory of a huge Hollywood spotlight, was the new South African
flag.

It has never looked so beautiful.

Those scarred and scary men, who had spent years in violent
combat of one form or another, became little boys in their joy and amazement. I
didn’t need to understand their language to know that. That flag, that piece of
cloth was the end of oppression to them. It made change and hope a reality. It
gave them citizenship of the land on which we travelled. The war was over.

It's 2015 and I live on a farm a few miles outside Bisho,
which is now spelled Bhisho, most of the time. I can see the town from some
parts of my land. It remains busy, as it now holds government offices for the
Eastern Cape Province, which now incorporates Ciskei and most of Transkei.

Warfare for us is about invading goats and meercat poaching.

There is a large memorial garden next to the Bhisho Stadium
where the 39 protestors were killed by Ciskei troops. A community center has
been under construction next door to the memorial for over two years now and
doesn’t appear to be anywhere near completion. TIA.

The horizon upon which I gaze from the front veranda of my
home stretches across rolling fields toward the Amatola Mountains. The sun sets
behind those mountains. On a clear day I can see distant African communities.
It has only been in recent years that I have been able to see them at night, as
they have become electrified.

When I drive toward town, I pass a site on which some large
concrete pieces of construction remain. It is what remains of the Ciskei Border
Post, the rest of that building having been redistributed for better uses among
the locals a long time ago. (TIA- nothing goes to waste)

All that remains is the name. Because now, this location is
called "Border Post." I would bet that a
good many of the "Born Free's," those born after 1994, don’t know why.

How wonderful it would be if a new generation of Americans could
look at a picture of the Confederate flag and see it as a symbol of a distant
past. The lowering of that flag is a significant step in the right direction. Maybe
a new United States needs a new flag.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan
Winters is a photojournalist and humanitarian who has lived in
the Eastern Cape region of South Africa since 1997. She previously
was a staff photographer for the Philadelphia Daily News, where I was her editor when she made several trips to South Africa to chronicle the enormous changes in that country after future President Nelson Mandela's release from prison.

Winters'
photo essays on a regional African National Congress leader's struggle to
survive transitional political violence and on life in squalid townships where few white journalists would go won the prestigious 1994
Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the Pulitzer for photojournalists. From
1997 to 2003, Winters published an AIDS education periodical and has produced several documentaries. She is the author of Nozuko's Story: The Story of an African Family, which chronicles
in words and photographs a young woman's journey through sickness
and survival, hope and despair, and brave activism on behalf of
HIV/AIDS sufferers.

Friday, June 26, 2015

Another day, another U.S. Supreme Court decision that should remind us things that once made America a great country like tolerance and helping the downtrodden are not entirely extinct.

A mere 24 hours after the high court dealt a major blow to conservatives in ruling 6-3 that a key provision of the Affordable Care Act passed muster, it ruled 5-4 that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage, providing gays a long-sought civil rights victory -- a victory coming too many years after rights for blacks and women had been validated -- that mirrored a seismic shift in public opinion.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who has long been sympathetic to gay rights, wrote the majority opinion. He was joined by the court's four liberal justices. Chief Justice John G. Robert Jr., who had written the majority opinion in the ACA case, was joined in dissent by the court's three conservative justices.

"No union is more profound than marriage," Kennedy wrote in declaring that gay and lesbian couples have a fundamental right to wed. "[I]t embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were."

"It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage," Kennedy said of the couples who challenged state bans on same-sex marriage. "Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right."

Roberts' dissent was laced with backhanded praise.

“If you are among the many Americans -- of whatever sexual orientation -- who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate today's decision," Roberts wrote. "Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it."

In an allusion to the rapidly increasing acceptance of same-sex marriage, Justice Kennedy noted that the Constitution's power rests with its ability to evolve along with society's consciousness, a view that further ignited reliably inflammatory and deeply conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

As in the ACA ruling, Scalia did not merely dissent but again showed evidence of being mentally unhinged and unsuitable even for a court that has tacked hard to the right in many cases. Using his trademark snide mockery, Scalia called the ruling a "judicial Putsch" that threatened American
democracy itself. "This is a naked judicial claim to legislative -- indeed,
super-legislative -- power," he wrote. "A system of government that makes
the people subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does
not deserve to be called a democracy."

In ruling on Obergefell v. Hodges, the court used cases from Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, where restrictions on same-sex marriage were upheld by an appeals court last year, to find that the Constitution does not allow such prohibitions.

In 2013, when the justices last confronted the issue of same-sex marriage, a similarly slim majority said that a key portion of the Defense of Marriage Act -- withholding the federal government’s recognition of same-sex marriages -- was unconstitutional, but in a separate case, the court said procedural issues kept it from answering the constitutional question in a case from California, but allowed same-sex marriages to resume in that state.

Since then, courts across the nation with the notable exception of the federal appeals court in Cincinnati, which left intact the restrictions in the four states at issue, have struck down prohibition after prohibition against same-sex marriage. Couples may now marry in 37 states and the District of Columbia.

The court focused on the constitutionality of same-sex unions and did not directly address the next battlefield for gay-rights advocates and civil libertarians: Isn't the argument that religious values may dictate public policy regarding secular institutions now legally invalid? And does not the decision reaffirm the separation of church and state? The answer to both should be a resounding "yes," although conservatives and many religious leaders will vehemently disagree.

Kennedy did allude to the issue in saying that people who disagree
with same-sex marriage for religious or other reasons have the
freedom to believe and to speak as they wish. "But when that sincere,
personal opposition becomes enacted law and public policy," he wrote, "the necessary consequence is to put the imprimatur of the State itself
on an exclusion that soon demeans or stigmatizes those whose own liberty
is then denied."

Speaking at the White House, President Obama called the ruling "a victory for America" and said it arrived "like a thunderbolt" after so many battles over same-sex marriage. "[It] will strengthen all of our communities," he added.

The consequences of the ruling for the Republican Party, which has used gay bashing as a cudgel in its ceaseless cultural war waging, are perhaps not as drastic as the ACA decision, but nevertheless large in terms of the 2016 election.

Six in 10 Americans support same-sex marriage, a number that jumps to seven in 10 when the respondents know someone who is gay or lesbian, and eight in 10 among those ages 18 to 29. Next year's election will be the first in which gay rights could be a major issue and that will put Republicans on the wrong side of history, as well as public opinion. Not exactly a winning formula.

Beyond the GOP having worked so hard to bite itself in the electoral ass and, in the process, continue its marginalization as a national political force, there is a deep irony here: The party that has blathered on and on . . . and on and on and on . . . about Family Values finds itself diametrically opposed to Americans who value access to affordable health care for their families and value people no matter what their sexual orientation happens to be.

Thursday, June 25, 2015

The U.S. Supreme Court today dealt a major blow to conservatives who have used everything from bare-knuckle politics to legislative sleight-of hand to frivolous litigation in a years-long effort to destroy the Affordable Care Act, a flawed but ultimately workable effort to bring affordable health care to all Americans as well as President Obama's signature achievement.

In a momentous 6-3 ruling, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in the majority opinion, as I had predicted, that Washington may indeed provide tax subsidies to help poor and middle-class people buy health insurance through federal-run exchanges. He and Justice Anthony Kennedy and the four justices in the court's so-called liberal bloc found that there was no merit to the claim of the cynically motivated and Koch brothers-bankrolled plaintiffs in King vs. Burwell that although the law familiarly known as Obamacare seems to say the subsidies are available only to people buying insurance on "an exchange established by the state," those words must be understood in a larger statutory context.

"In this instance,” Roberts wrote in a blow for reason over mean-spirited political gamesmanship, "the context and structure of the act compel us to depart from what would otherwise be the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase. . . . Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter."

The Supreme Court has become a tarnished
institution, but it
is to the credit of Roberts and the concurring justices
that they interpreted the ACA and did not try to rewrite it. Said Roberts:"In a democracy, the power to make the law rests with those chosen by the
people. Our role is more confined—to say what the law is."

As expected, the court's three most conservative members -- Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. -- dissented. Scalia ignored the fact the entire case rested on a four-word legislative glitch and accused the majority of "interpretive jiggery-pokery" in an ideological farce of a case the court never should have taken up in the first place. "We should start calling this law SCOTUScare," the reliably spiteful justice added.

The case was freighted with heavy baggage.

An estimated 32.2 million people are enrolled in health insurance plans on state and federal exchanges under the ACA, while the percentage of adults who lack health insurance is at a record low of 11.9 percent, according to a new Gallup-Healthways poll. But had the court ruled for the plaintiffs, an estimated 7 million people in 34 states with federal exchanges would be impacted and their health care costs could spike by almost 300 percent, according to some estimates.

The court's majority seemed particularly concerned about the consequences if the federal exchanges, with their subsidies for low- and some middle-income people, imploded. Or as Roberts put it, "The combination of no tax credits and an ineffective coverage
requirement could well push a state's individual insurance market into a
death spiral." And let's not forget that the court is reliably pro-big business, in this instance the gigantic health care and insurance industries.

The knots that Republicans have tied themselves in over the ACA had been getting tighter and tighter.

After years of condemning the greatest leap forward in health-care reform since Medicare laws were enacted in 1966, including scare mongering about "death panels" and other lies on an epic scale, as well as dozens of unsuccessful House repeal votes, the GOP noise machine has fallen silent. This is because a growing majority of Americans now understand that Obamacare works, warts and all, and the GOP would have been faced with some very unpleasant realities if the Supreme Court granted the party its wish and gutted the law.

Republicans, who control both houses of Congress, would not have known what to do if the high court nixed the federal exchange subsidies, while extending those subsidies by congressional fiat would have incurred the the wrath of the party's reliably cantankerous conservative base and most of the dozen or so (but then who's counting?) wannabes crowded into the GOP presidential primary clown car.

The Obama administration professed to have no back-up plan.

The decision was the second major high court ruling for the ACA and the second written by Roberts. In the first in 2012, the plaintiffs unsuccessfully argued that the individual mandate provision of the law -- requiring people who lack health insurance to buy it -- was unconstitutional because Congress overstepped its bounds in regulating interstate commerce, while the provision in the law expanding Medicaid to cover millions of additional low-income people was an unconstitutional use of power over the states.

While Republicans have been all over the place in fighting Obamacare, their core arguments have been that requiring Americans to buy health insurance is a violation of their "freedom and liberty" and the law "a massive power grab" by the president.

Beyond helping those 32.2 million people buy health insurance, the law caps insurance premiums for the poor, helps those under age 26 stay on their parents' health plans, protects those with pre-existing conditions, covers mental health care, requires insurers to spend most of every premium dollar on medical care, as opposed to administrative and advertising costs, has accelerated a modest decrease in health care costs, and provided generous tax credits to small businesses who provide health insurance for their employees.

Federal marketplace subsidies appear to be doing exactly as was intended.

Some 87 percent of people enrolled in those marketplaces receive subsidies in the form of tax credits to
help pay their insurance premiums, and many would otherwise be unable to buy insurance. The
subsidies also appear to have attracted younger and
healthier individuals into the new insurance markets, stabilizing
premiums, even for people who pay the full cost themselves.

It should not be forgotten, however, that the ruling is a victory for the profit-greedy health care
and health insurance industries, further decreasing the chances of a fairer and more cost-effective and fair
single-payer system.

Conservatives in general and Republicans in particular have now been handed their teeth on Obamacare in Congress (2010), at the
ballot box (2012), and twice in
the Supreme Court (2012, 2015), so it is difficult to see where they might now turn despite their claims that Obamacare remains deeply unpopular. In fact, 47 percent of Americans approve of the law in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, a five-year high, and pollsters find that the more people understand what the law is about the more people approve of it.

Republicans facing re-election in states with federal exchanges are sure to have been secretly relieved that they won't face the inevitable backlash a ruling against the law would have provoked. And the decision provides an opportunity for a bipartisan effort to improve aspects of the law that need fine tuning. That is not going to happen, of course, and within minutes of the decision being announced there were predictable demands that Republicans controlling the House and Senate increase their efforts to repeal the law through a filibuster-proof budget procedure known as reconciliation.

The problem for the GOP is that President Obama would never sign repeal legislation, reconciliation is an iffy procedure, and efforts to nibble away at aspects of the law faces mixed chances of success. While the House voted this week to eliminate a special payment advisory board created by the law in a worthy effort to hold down costs because of specious claims that the board would ration health care, the proposal stands no chance in the Senate where it can be filibustered by Democrats.

"The American people believe both subsidies and mandates are wrong, so it's now up to Congress to use reconciliation to repeal Obamacare, and Congress should continue to do so until there is a president who is willing to sign that repeal,” harrumphed David McIntosh, a former Republican House member who is president of the free-market Club for Growth.

If that president is Hillary Clinton, then it will be more of the same Republican whining and obfuscation. But if a Republican wins next year, which is a long shot at this point, all bets are off.

Even though Ohio Governor John
Kasich has not formally announced that he's joining the already crowded
Republican presidential field, he seems to be everywhere except back
home these days. That is everywhere there might be potential donors who
believe this swing state governor may just be the guy to rally what's
left of the GOP's moderate base as an alternative to the floundering
candidacy of Jeb Bush.

The
mainstream media had all but handed Bush the nomination a few short
months ago on the strength of his prodigious fund raising, close ties to
party moderates, and the belief that an establishment-oriented
candidate like himself had the best chance of beating Hillary Clinton.
But as I wrote in a recent Politix Update, the media pretty much got it wrong: Bush
has many more challengers for the nomination than it was
presumed there would be, while fellow Floridian Marco Rubio is running
even if Mitt Romney is not, and while he may be establishment oriented
his party is increasingly less so. He also has run a lackluster
campaign and has not figured out how to deal with the deep antipathy
with
which many Republicans view his big brother for sullying the party
brand, a reality that in the end may be impossible to overcome.

Kasich's big problem is that he is getting in late, if he gets in at all. And while his moderate bona fides will
appeal to voters outside the GOP's increasingly white and right wing
base, and he served two terms in Congress, just because he's a lot like
Jeb Bush on policy issues doesn't mean he can pre-empt him by benefiting
from the panic felt by party moderates who believe the Bush campaign
has run out of steam.

There's also his tacit support of the Affordable Care Act by expanding
Medicaid coverage for low-income adults in Ohio two years ago. This
will alienate him from the Republicans nationally who believe that
access to affordable health care is a socialist evil, or something, as
well as distance him from the many presidential wannabes who have either
voted to repeal Obamacare or vociferously oppose it. His
allies counter that Kasich won reelection last year with 64 percent of
the vote in part because of what they call a courageous economic and
moral stand for the poor.

Nor
does a Kasich bid mean that conservative candidates like Rubio are
going to roll over. Conservatives believe, naively in my view, that
this is their year to take back the White House after the disappointing
showings by moderates John McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012.

A key to whether Kasich runs is if he can corral the support of Rupert Murdoch, the media tycoon and Fox News owner who has an oversized voice in Republican Party affairs. Politico notes that Murdoch and Kasich, who was a Fox News
host for six years, are close friends and Kasich has gotten Murdoch to
contribute lavishly to Republican causes in the past. So how about his
own cause?

In any event, Kasich seems to be making points, in part because of his reputation for not mincing words.

"That
was more candor in 30 minutes than I've heard in three hours of
listening to other
politicians talk," said Wes Climer, chairman of the York County (S.C.)
Republican Party, after hosting
a Kasich appearance. And at an appearance before big donors in Southern
California, one of them told Kasich that she disagreed with the
governor's decision to expand Medicaid coverage. "I don't know about
you, lady," he fired back, "But when I get to the pearly gates, I'm
going to have to answer for what I've done for the poor."

ENTER THE BIDENISTAS

Call him the Phantom Candidate.

Vice
President Biden has not said he will be running for president, but
neither has he ruled it out, which gives hope to Democrats -- at this
point a small handful, anyway -- who do not much care for presumptive
nominee Hillary Clinton and believe Biden would be the best Democrat to
carry on the legacy of Barack Obama.

Will Pierce, an Army Reserve
captain who served in Iraq, chairs the Draft Biden movement, which he
runs out of a small office in Chicago. He says the movement has
collected 81,000 petition signatures, is fundraising and hopes to lure
Biden into the race after a series of campaign rallies.

"We’re
bringing on more people. We just want to show the vice president the
support he has," says Pierce. "When and if he
gets into the race, he'll have a foundation. He'll have some endorsers.
He'll have a grass-roots organization ready to go."

In the
unlikely event Biden decided to run, that almost certainly would be
predicated on Clinton having to withdraw from the race for, say, health
reasons. If Biden was then nominated -- and the possibility that he
would beat whomever the Republicans threw at him -- he would be 77 at
the end of a first term, making him the oldest of any president in
history. That alone would seem to rule against run. Meanwhile, Biden
has been in Washington for 42 years and, one would think, is pretty
damned tired of life in the public eye.

Add to that the
recent death of his son, Beau, to brain cancer at age 48 and it's
difficult to see Biden doing anything other than going home to tiny
Delaware after a outsized career.

WATCH YOUR BACKS, GOP GOVERNORS

So
you're a Republican governor but your ambitions are higher. Much
higher -- liking running for president. So at this stage of the game,
your focus is on the early primary states more than your own, and while
your policy decisions might go over well among the Republican burghers
of Iowa or New Hampshire, members of your own party are in revolt back
home.

It has happened to Chris Christie in New Jersey and Bobby
Jindal in Louisiana, and now Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is feeling
the slings and arrows of Republican legislators over his repeated
demands to do more with less, like pay for $1.3 billion in bridge and
road repairs without raising taxes. While this so-called fiscal
responsibility may play well with conservatives nationally, what Walker
really wants to do is borrow that $1.3 billion, which his legislative
colleagues say is irresponsible.

Campaigning in Iowa and elsewhere, Walker boasts of lowering taxes by $2 billion
and lowering unemployment, but he does not mention that Wisconsin ranked 35th in job growth in the
nation during his first term, and that it trails its upper Midwest neighbors.

The
no-new-taxes pledge is indeed a winner out on the hustings, but
Wisconsin legislators are more interested in bridges that don't fall
down and roads that don't fall apart. Kinda like Kansas, where Governor
Sam Brownback's anti-tax extremism has won him applause among
conservatives but infuriated legislators and plunged the state into a
fiscal crisis. And in the long run destroyed any chance of Brownback
being taken seriously as presidential material.

Politix Update
is an irregular compendium written by veteran journalist Shaun Mullen,
for whom the 2016 presidential campaign is his (gasp!) 12th since 1968.
Click here for an index of previous Politix Updates.

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery. Where in the world are the Negroes better off today than in America? ~ JACK KERSHAW, League of the South board member

I wrote at the beginning of 2011 — the 150th anniversary of the onset
of the American Civil War — that it would be the year the South would
rise again. Given the rapid-fire developments in the week since the
racism-fueled massacre of nine black people in a Charleston church, will
2015 be the year that the South would be put back in its box? Is the
Lost Cause finally and truly lost?

There is an immense difference between the Civil War and every other
war in American history. This is because the Civil War, which cleaved a
still young nation into two parts and led to the loss of a horrific
620,000 lives, is that it is still being fought by a rag bag of
organizations like the League of the South and Council of Conservative
Citizens that are fueled by Lost Causers who many generations on remain
willfully wrong about the roll that slavery played in the destruction of
their precious South. The latest generation of these delusionists
include 21-year-old Confederate battle flag wearer and church shooter Dylann Roof, whose anti-black
manifesto references the council, a contributor to no fewer than three
Republican presidential candidates.

Yes, there were other reasons for the Civil War, including states
rights and collapse of the two-political party system and emergence of
the Whigs as personified by Abraham Lincoln, whose overriding purpose
well into the war was to keep the union together and not to abolish
slavery, a fact conveniently lost on the descendants of Northerners who
in their own way also have abridged history to fit a more convenient
story line and have their own share of racists.

But there is no other explanation than a purposeful ignorance based
on racism for the endurance of flag-waving Lost
Causers, their fanaticism stoked by Southern politicians who
worshipfully embrace the Lost Cause with quotidian regularity and just
as regularly walk back from their shameful statements after the damage
is yet again done.

Yet this time is different, perhaps because the cumulative fantasy of
the defenders of displaying the Confederate battle flag at the South
Carolina statehouse and thousands of other public places throughout the
South that they are honoring their brave ancestors and not being racists
became too monstrous to be contained any longer and exploded in their
white faces with the massacre of the pastor and eight congregants at
historically African-American Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church
on June 17.

The Confederate battle flag and like symbols have long existed in a
sort of shadow land between a fictive present and a factual past, and among the many lies told by white denialists is that the flag always has been displayed in the South. The truth is that only during the Jim Crow era and since was the flag reintroduced and defiantly flown as a reminder of white supremacy.

This is something that Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. bravely acknowledged in saying that even though the flag symbolized “Southern pride” to some people, it had a deeply sinister meaning to others. And, might I add, this is not merely a matter of free speech.

"When it is so often used as a symbol of hate," Riley said, "of defiance to civil rights, to equal rights, equality among the races, a symbol used by the Klan, a symbol you saw at every protest event during times of integration and racial progress, then, in front of the State Capitol, for those who harbor any of those kinds of feelings -- and we hope they are very few -- it nonetheless sends the wrong kind of message."

How good it was of South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, in for the
removal of the flag from the capitol, to suddenly understand that
it was time to do just that after years of defending the flag’s
presence. What had begun as scattered calls to strip symbols of the
Confederacy from public places, license plates and stores online and
off, had quickly morphed into a nationwide movement. Amazon, eBay,
Walmart and Sears fell into step, announcing that they would no longer
allow the sale of Confederate flags and similarly themed merchandise.

I give Haley very little credit and retailers even less. She could
have ordered removal of the flag and asked the state Legislature to
validate her order. She did not, and the collective cowards known as
the Republican presidential field predictably suddenly found their
voices, silently thanking Haley for letting them off the hook.

Typical
among them was Scott Walker, who declared “I support her decision”
within hours after his campaign sheepishly announcing that it was
donating a contribution from Dylan Roof’s favorite organization to
charity. All of this mushy-mouthedness in the face, lest we forget, of the amazing grace of the families of the church massacre victims in saying that they forgave the sick young man who exterminated their loved ones.

Opined conservative commentator Jennifer Rubin, of all people: "That
any member of the party of Lincoln could not condemn veneration of the
flag for which the martyred president and hundreds of thousands of
Americans gave their lives to defeat is, frankly, stunning. Many who
seek to lead the party and country in a divisive time showed they are
just not up to the task."

* * * * *

It comes as no surprise that in the 14 years since the 9/11attacks,
nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists,
anti-government fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical
Muslims. After all, the Charleston church massacre was only the latest
lethal attack by people spewing racial hatred and hostility to
government.

Since 9/11, 48 people have been killed by extremists who are not
Muslim, compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a
survey by New America, a Washington research center.

But many of us do not want to acknowledge that sobering truth.

Efforts by government agencies to conduct research on right-wing
extremism since the election of Barack Obama, the first African-American
president, repeatedly have run into resistance from Republicans. A 2009
report by the Department of Homeland Security that warned an ailing
economy and the election of the first black president might prompt a
violent reaction from white supremacists, was withdrawn in the face of
conservative criticism.

In other words, Republicans have defended the most vile and deeply sociopathic elements in our society like Dylann Roof. It does not matter whether they have done so unwittingly or not. How else to construe that?

* * * * *

Things certainly would be simpler today if the Civil War had not been about slavery.

We could content ourselves with arguing about who was the better
general, why the Confederacy was able to survive for so long despite an
overwhelming disadvantage in troops and materiel, whether Pickett’s
Charge was an avoidable mistake or Sherman was a war criminal because of
his fiery March to the Sea.

"If the war actually weren’t about slavery, I think all our lives
would be a lot easier," writes the inestimable Ta-Nehisi Coates, the
blogger descendant of slaves who has studied the war with an enviably
clear-eyed detachment.

"But as I thought on it, my sadness was stupid," he says. "What
undergirds all of this alleged honoring of the Confederacy, is a kind of
ancestor-worship that isn’t. The Lost Cause is necromancy — it summons
the dead and enslaves them to the need of their vainglorious,
self-styled descendants."

The greatest crime of the Lost Causers — and crime is not too strong a
word in the context of the pain, beyond the neverending epidemic of
hate crimes they continue to cause right-minded people of all colors —
is that they deny the humanity of the very people whom they claim to
venerate. In "honoring" the past they cannot cope with the present.

Although this comparison is not perfect, it works well enough: The
Germans have fessed up to their history, the Japanese have denied it,
while the Lost Causers have simply rewritten it.

Lowering the flag of the Old South will not erase the church massacre or return the lives of the many thousands, including civil rights workers, extinguished in the cause of racial justice. But may we be united in
prayer that our nation will begin to turn the corner in renouncing our hateful past -- and present.

"Because
it was just about perfect. The Dead had just finished recording the seminal Terrapin Station album and were unbelievably loose. They had been on a roll all spring with
nary a bad note or an off-key lyric in the half dozen or so shows I'd
already seen. The setting this particular night was Barton Hall, the
Gothic Revival performance space at Cornell University. It was
acoustically sublime. And incidentally, the show was voted the Dead's best ever in a 2013 poll in, of all places, The New York Times.

"Anyhow . . .

"In typical Dead style, they took us to amazing places
during a four-hour extravaganza, elevating us to great and
then greater heights, and then bringing us down ever so
gently at the end as they were wont to do when everything was clicking. And although it was May, snow was
falling when we walked out of the hall. The perfect
touch to end a perfect evening."

THAT WAS THEN AND NOW IS NOW

FREE CONCERT -- HAIGHT-ASHBURY, SAN FRANCISCO (MARCH 3, 1968)

Deadheads
who believe it will be old times all over again, whether it be 1968, 1978 or whatever 8, when the Grateful Dead take the stage for five shows next Saturday and Sunday
and early July in celebration of the band's 50th anniversary, are likely
to be disappointed.

That is not to take anything away from
what

JERRY GARCIA (1942-1995)

are being billed as the Fare Thee Well shows, which the Dead say
will be their last ever. The concerts at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara,
California on June 27-28 and at Soldier Field in Chicago on July 3-5
are bound to be great, but it's 2015 and that's where the heads of
the "Core Four" --

Expect them and Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio (whose band owes an enormous debt to the Dead),
pianist Bruce Hornsby and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti to play many of
the old favorites over those five

PHIL LESH (1940-)

evenings. The shows are to be webstreamed,
simulcast on SiriusXM and shown in selected theaters for the many of us
-- hell, the millions of us -- who don't have tickets. But Anastasio is not
Jerry Garcia, nor will he pretend to be. He certainly is likely to
evoke the late, great Garcia's magic

and the entire aggregation
certainly will evoke an extraordinary era in music, but that was then
and now is now.

The concerts are to be enjoyed for what they are and
not what the Dead used to be.

LIFE CAN BE MESSY AND SO WERE THE DEAD

For
the record, the Grateful Dead's first show -- they were billed as
Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions -- was at Magoo's Pizza in the San
Francisco suburb of Menlo Park on May 5, 1965. The last show was at Soldier Field in Chicago on July 9, 1995. Garcia died exactly one month later at a drug rehab facility in Marin County, California. (Alcohol and drugs were especially tough on the band's keyboard players, four of whom succumbed to causes other than stage fright.)

The Dead did a total
of 2,318 shows during those three decades, and tapes exist for nearly 2,200 of them. I saw perhaps a hundred shows involving the band and their spinoffs, including the Jerry Garcia Band, Old and In the Way, Kingfish, Diga Rhythm Devils, Phil Lesh Band and Furthur.

BILL KREUTZMANN (1946-) AND MICKY HART (1943-)

As I reflected on those shows, I again realized that the Dead were much more than music. They were a state of mind, at least to Deadheads, and there were deeply intellectual aspects to them. I'm not kidding.

I wrote this about the Dead in There's A House In The Land, my 2014 book about a tribe of like-minded souls who lived on a farm beyond Philadelphia's far western suburbs in the 1970s:

"Like many high school kids my

age, I fell
hard for soul, rhythm and

KEITH GODCHAUX (1948-1980)

blues and, of course, the British Invasion bands. I had been introduced to jazz by way of the Dave Brubeck Quartet at the tender age of 14. In college, Ian and Sylvia, Joan Baez and Gordon Lightfoot became folk favorites, and I rocked to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in all their incarnations. With my introduction to psychedelics, I fell hard for the usual

DONNA GODCHAUX (1947-)

suspects, Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd chief among them. Then there was reggae.

"But my main men were the Grateful Dead, who I saw
in concert for the first time in the fall of 1967 following
the Summer of Love and many more times over the
years.

"I was initially attracted by the Dead's acid suffused jamming and wordplay.

could run to 20 minutes or longer and had a profound effect on my youngish sponge of a mind even if I did conclude later that the words were

VINCE WELNICK (1951-2006)

pretty much off the cuff nonsense.

Then there was the Dead's bluegrass side and their
wonderful catalog of Americana songs (think "New Speedway Boogie," "Jack Straw" and, of course,
"Truckin") that grew out of Jerry Garcia's collaboration
with Robert Hunter, who is as good a songwriter as the
gods of Tin Pan Alley. . . .

"Life can be messy and so were the

BRUCE HORNSBY (1954-)

Dead. Unlike many
stars, Garcia did not seek out fame. At heart an
unassuming man who just wanted to play music, fame
found him. And despite a long career as an
extraordinary composer and guitarist that brought him
adulation, gold records and eventually wealth,

happiness remained elusive. He was never able to get
the addictive drug monkey off his back for very long
once it climbed on. Technically, heroin finally killed
him, or rather his heart, but I believe that fame w

ROBERT HUNTER (1941-)

as the
real culprit.

"But for a while, and that very much included the 1970s,
things were good. The Dead’s sound was so technically
sophisticated, with an unheard of clarity and purity, that
it took other bands years to catch up sonically. The
Dead's concerts were so popular that their front office
set up a system through which their most devoted fans
had first dibs at tickets, the band would only play in cities where arena managers and the police would
permit camping, and they tithed a considerable amount
of their profits to charities.

"Not unlike the farm, the Dead's success was accidental
and at the same time preordained because of the times.
Garcia liked to call their popularity a "miraculous
manifestation." I call it synchronicity. Then there was
my favorite bumper sticker of the era: Who are the Grateful Dead, and why do they keep
following me?"

THAT AWESOME WALL OF SOUND

SOUND CHECK -- VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA (MAY 17, 1974)

Things were especially good in 1974. The Dead always were sonic
trailblazers, and although it makes me sound like a purist who prefers
vinyl to MP3s (which I happen to do), there never has been a finer
concert sound system than the Dead's legendary Wall of Sound, which made
its touring debut at the Cow Palace in San Francisco on March 23, 1974
and blew its last mind on October 16-20, 1974 during a five-show run at
Winterland Ballroom, also in San Francisco, and captured in The Grateful Dead Movie.

The
Wall of Sound was an enormous public

McINTOSH AMP STACK

address system designed -- and,
according to lore, paid for -- by Augustus Owsley Stanley III, a
one-time underground LSD chemist known as "Bear" by the Dead and their
fans and the inspiration for the band's dancing bear motifs.

Owsley
eventually was busted. After he got out of prison in 1972, he, three members of the Dead's sound crew and three Alembic Sound wonks cobbled together
six independent sound systems using eleven separate channels to deliver stunning high-quality. Vocals, Garcia's lead
guitar,

Weir's rhythm guitar and Keith Godchaux's piano each had their
own channel and
speakers, Lesh's bass was piped through a quadraphonic encoder that sent
signals from each of the four strings to a separate

FROM THE FLOOR

channel. Another channel amplified
drummers Kreutzmann and
Hart.

Because each speaker carried just one instrument or vocalist,
the sound was exceptionally clear and so free of distortion that it
could be heard up to a quarter mile away, which is where wind
interference began to be a factor.

The system was assembled behind the band so the Dead could hear exactly what
their audience was hearing. Owsley and Alembic designed a custom
microphone system to prevent feedback with matched pairs of condenser
mikes spaced 60 mm (about 2.4 inches) apart and intentionally run out of phase.

The
hardware that comprised this 75-ton monolith was mind boggling: 89
300-watt solid-state and three 350-watt vacuum tube amps generating
26,400 watts of audio power, and 604 speakers (586 JBLs and 54
Electrovoices) powered by 48 McIntosh MC-2300 600-watt amps for 28,000
watts of continuous power. I was so enamored of the sound that I saved
up and bought two identical JBL speakers, which I hung in the farm's
kitchen.

GOT IT LIVE IF YOU WANT IT

LIVE AT THE BROOME COUNTY ARENA, BINGHAMTON, NEW YORK (NOVEMBER 6, 1977)

It should go without saying that hearing music live is not an objective phenomenon, but I'll say it anyhow.

Like I said, I
have heard the Grateful Dead and their various spinoff bands in live
performances a hundred or so times beginning in 1967 and most recently
in 2011 in one of their post-Jerry Garcia incarnations. The original
Dead was a band of legendary unevenness. The great shows were truly
awesome and the off shows not that bad. And all of them social as well as aural events.

The
last time I saw the original Dead -- at Madison Square Garden in New
York City in 1990 -- is memorable not so much for the show as a lesson
learned that in retrospect offered insight into why music can feel so

JERRY'S LAST SHOW (July 9, 1995)

good.

I thought the show was only okay, but as we approached the
Lincoln Tunnel on the ride back to a friend's home in North Jersey, a
guy in his early 20s riding in the front seat turned to me and, breaking
his silence, said that while he had gone to church much of his life, it
did not begin to compare to what he had just experienced -- his first
Dead concert.

An experience I found to be kind
of meh was, to this guy,
"mesmerizing," "electric," "profound" and most of all, "spiritual." He
said that he had wept at one point. While our views of the show
differed (and not being a spoilsport I kept my view to myself), I
understood because there had been times -- always
toward the end of the Dead's endlessly layered and jam-infused second
sets -- when I had wept, too. Not many times, mind you, but enough to
understand I wasn't losing my mind (okay, probably not) but was feeling a
oneness and intimacy, as well as the sensation that everything in my
life had
been predestined to lead me up to this moment. It was very much a
satori.

'WINGS A MILE LONG JUST CARRIED THE BIRD AWAY'

"Eyes of the World," the Grateful Deadclassic and stuff of many extended concert
jams, has been an anthem of sorts for me since I heard it all over
again for the first time while camping many moons ago at Big Sur on the
California coast, a beautiful area that seems especially connect to the
song. I've always felt that "Eyes" for written for me -- and for you.

The Grateful Dead themselves had this to say in an online letter about the Fare Thee Well shows:

Ours wasn't just a long, strange trip — it was a very long, very strange
trip. We weren't sure what it was going to be like to put a punctuation
mark on the end of it. None of us anticipated the overwhelming
outpouring of love and interest following our initial announcement of

the shows at Soldier Field, and we were blown away by the response.

We
have tried to do the right thing

SKULL AND ROSES POSTER (1968)

wherever we could for the Chicago
shows by honoring the roots of where

we came from, while dealing with
the realities of the current times. But that’s hardly comforting when
you’re shit outta luck for tickets and your only option is inflated
prices on secondary ticketing websites. That would piss us off too.

From
the moment these shows were first talked about, we have been

thinking
about what we could do to honor the roots of our Deadhead experience,
even in the face of changing technologies. (Remember: Ticketmaster
didn’t even go online until we got out of the game.) These shows were
always intended as an expression of our gratitude, to both the music and
the fans, so it’s important that we get things as right as we can.

We
have always been proud of our

DEAD-MILES POSTER (1970)

in-house mail order ticketing process,
and the phenomenal way our fans have built a tradition out of turning a
standard envelope into a frame-worthy piece of art. Some 60,000 mail
order tickets were issued for the Soldier Field shows by the good folks
at Grateful Dead Ticket Sales — yet we were still crushed to see how
many of your beautifully designed envelopes did not get tickets. . . .

We
will not be adding any more Fare Thee Well shows. The three Chicago
shows will still be our final stand. We decided to add these two Santa
Clara shows to enable more of our fans to celebrate with us one more
time. But this is it.

We love you guys more than words can tell.

Legendary rock impressario Bill Graham, whom I met a few times on backstage rambles (I actually preferred being out front), was hard as nails but adored the Dead.

"They're not the best at what they do," he liked to say in introducing the band, "They're the only ones who do what they do.

Amen, and thank you, guys.

“They’re
not the best at what they do, they’re the only ones that do what
they do.” - See more at:
http://gapingvoid.com/2010/10/03/dont/#sthash.iGMq3z2r.dpuf

“They’re
not the best at what they do, they’re the only ones that do what
they do.” - See more at:
http://gapingvoid.com/2010/10/03/dont/#sthash.iGMq3z2r.dpuf"They're not the best at what they do," he liked to remark. "They're the only ones who do what they do."Amen. And thank you, guys.

About Me

Shaun Mullen was born to blog. It just took a few years for the medium to catch up to the messenger. Over a long career with newspapers, this award-winning editor and reporter covered the Vietnam War, O.J. Simpson trials, Clinton impeachment circus and coming of Osama bin Laden, among many other big stories. Mullen was a five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and has covered 12 presidential campaigns. He is the author of "The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder" (2010) and "There's A House In The Land: A Tale of the 1970s" (2014). Both books are available for sale online in trade paperback and Kindle editions. Much of Mullen's work is archived and can be accessed online in the Shaun D. Mullen Journalism Papers in Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library.